Re: [xsl] Non-English languages in XSLT, XML Schema grammars

Subject: Re: [xsl] Non-English languages in XSLT, XML Schema grammars
From: Michael Müller-Hillebrand <mmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:37:10 +0200
Am 18.04.2008 um 21:19 schrieb Ramkumar Menon:

I had a question. Why is it that languages like XML Schema, XSLT etc
allow only English in the element and attribute names ?  I am not
referring to the content, but the actual elements and attributes
defined by the grammar.
i.e.  <schema>, <template>, <call-template>, <for-each>, <element>,
<attribute> etc....
Does it make any sense at all to allow these grammars itself to
support writing schemas/xslts etc in local languages.

As a practical example, I was involved in changing the element and attribute names of a DTD from German into English to allow a wider audience to better understand their meaning. The major part of the work was to change existing documents, as you can guess.

Since XML allows almost all Unicode characters for element and
attribute names, there is nothing to stop you from having the same
grammar in multiple localizations. For XSL it would be rather easy to
detect the current localization and to apply a preprocessing to
transform those files into a (let's say) base language.

That this is not very likely to happen, could be connected to the
fact that almost all programming languages I know use English
wording. So at least programmers are very much used to that
vocabulary. But if you think of XML authoring environments it could
really improve the quality of how the content is tagged if the
element/attribute names would be well-chosen and localized.

To bring his back to XSL: I guess it would be rather easy to create a
solution to create localized DTDs/Schemas or to 'un-localize'
documents based on a common table-like definition of names.

Any designer tool can then interpret the text as per the character
encoding specified in the document declaration and render it according
to the locale/language preferences.

I would not mess around with character encodings, I am so happy that Unicode/UTF-8 is almost everywhere now.

- Michael M|ller-Hillebrand

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Michael M|ller-Hillebrand: Dokumentations-Technologie
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